Robert Stein (1950)

Robert Stein (1972)

Robert Stein (2000s)

About Me

editor, publisher, media critic and journalism teacher,
is a former Chairman of the American Society of Magazine Editors, and author of “Media Power: Who Is Shaping Your Picture of the World?” Before the war in Iraq, he wrote in The New York Times: “I see a generation gap in the debate over going to war in Iraq. Those of us who fought in World War II know there was no instant or easy glory in being part of 'The Greatest Generation,' just as we knew in the 1990s that stock-market booms don’t last forever.
We don’t have all the answers, but we want to spare our children and grandchildren from being slaughtered by politicians with a video-game mentality."
This is not meant to extol geezer wisdom but suggest that, even in our age of 24/7 hot flashes, something can be said for perspective.
The Web is a wide space for spreading news, but it can also be a deep well of collective memory to help us understand today’s world. In olden days, tribes kept village elders around to remind them with which foot to begin the ritual dance. Start the music.

Monday, August 10, 2009

Stimulus as a State of Mind

Nothing significant has happened, but suddenly the economy is looking better. Excitement over snippets of good news, or more accurately less-bad news, is underscoring how much of it all is psychological and suggesting that Obama's aggressive stimulus attack, no matter how flawed, wasteful and even wrong-headed, has been crucial to keeping us from going over the edge.

In the past few days, the usually sober New York Times has been agog with happy talk about the economic crisis, climaxed today by a Paul Krugman assertion that Big Government "saved us" by not fearfully cutting spending and "unlike in the 1930s, the government didn’t take a hands-off attitude while much of the banking system collapsed."

This follows an analysis saying: “A report card on the stimulus plan offered by analysts nearly six months after it was passed by Congress suggests that the punch from increased government spending has helped the economy begin to bottom out faster than it would have otherwise.”

Yet another interpretive piece concludes that "the evidence is now pointing pretty strongly in one direction: history books may conclude that the financial crisis of 2008 turned out to be far less bad than it could have been and that Washington deserved much of the credit."

Before passing all this off as liberal wishful thinking, contrast today's situation with the economic free fall of the 1970s when accidental president Gerald Ford tried to cheerlead the nation out of stagflation with WIN buttons (Whip Inflation Now) and presided over low growth and runaway inflation that persisted through the Carter years into the Reagan era.

It will take months, even years, before the verdict is in on the wisdom of every aspect of the enormous Obama spending and deficit growth, but one thing is already clear: All that furious activity has been more reassuring than a President McCain approach of tax cuts and hoping for the best.

For the economy as a whole, Cash for Clunkers may signify the importance of getting consumers to feel that the sky is not falling and, given enough time, they will do the rest.